Standard time

Can Bill Kristol's hip journal grow into a major player?

For the battle-weary staff of the conservative Weekly Standard, its
current effort -- a GALA CLINTON-BASHING ISSUE! -- is the journalistic
equivalent of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. It's comfort food, intended to
soothe the soul.

With loving detail, the six-story package analyzes the Clintons' shaky sense
of ethics, Hillary's Eleanor Roosevelt fixation, and the odds of Filegate's
erupting into a scandal of presidency-ruining proportions. "More than
Whitewater or the Paula Jones case or even Travelgate," writes executive editor
Fred Barnes hopefully, "Filegate may engage the press and the public and
prolong itself indefinitely."

Not that the Standard hasn't made Clinton-bashing a regular part of its
menu. But since last September, when the Rupert Murdoch-backed venture was
launched with great fanfare, the magazine's editors have found themselves in an
unexpected position: on the defensive. Intended as a vehicle to promote Newt
Gingrich's Republican revolution and keep it on track, the Standard has
instead found itself caught in the Gingrich implosion, fighting to regain
territory that had already been won, while at the same time angering its
natural constituency by departing from conservative orthodoxy.

The Republican Party's self-destruction has been surprisingly good for the
Standard, which has emerged from the wreckage as a hip, often irreverent
voice with nasty, eye-catching covers, short takes on the issues of the day,
and inside political dope. Longer pieces focus on a broad range of issues, such
as the alleged sins of feminism, the war between animal-rights and AIDS
activists, the purported hypocrisy of New Age guru Deepak Chopra, and a
scathing look at "James Carville, Populist Plutocrat."

Now, with the magazine's first birthday just two months away, the question
that editor and publisher William Kristol must answer is whether he can move
beyond the revolution that wasn't and position the Standard as a major
conservative voice for the long haul.

Quayle's brain

The relationship between the Standard and ideological soul mate
Gingrich was evident right from the start. In the debut issue, Kristol, a
master Republican strategist best known for serving as Vice-President Quayle's
chief-of-staff ("Dan Quayle's brain," as the New Republic once dubbed
him), and later for leading the charge against the Clintons' health-care plan,
proclaimed that "there has been a conservative realignment," and that "[w]e
have every reason to expect it will last."

Like Gingrich, the Standard espouses smaller government, lower taxes,
less regulation, free trade, and an anti-choice stand on abortion that depends
more on moral suasion than legislation. The moment seemed perfect. But by the
time the Standard was up and running, Gingrich's popularity had already
begun its precipitous slide, the victim of a prolonged budget battle with the
White House in which the president managed to portray congressional Republicans
as heartless technocrats who would shred the social safety net and cast old
people into the gutter.

Barnes argues that the eclipse of Gingrich has obscured the success and
continued popularity of the Speaker's agenda. "Gingrich has taken a beating.
Gingrichism has not taken a beating," Barnes told the Phoenix. "Every
day, Bill Clinton adopts more of the Republican agenda. Even some Republicans
don't realize how successful they've been."

Yet the most vigorous strain of Republicanism to emerge in 1996 has been that
of Pat Buchanan, whose protectionist, nativist sentiments and uncompromising
opposition to abortion rights are antithetical to Gingrichism. The
Standard rode to the sound of the guns with a cover editorial on March 4
denouncing Buchanan's "corrosive anti-institutional populism," and with a March
11 piece by Norman Podhoretz, retired editor of the neoconservative
Commentary (and father of Standard deputy editor John Podhoretz),
arguing that Buchanan should be disqualified because of his well-documented
anti-Semitism.

Kristol, meanwhile, stands accused of selling out conservatism because of his
dalliance with a Colin Powell presidential candidacy last fall, and of selling
out Republican prospects by his repeated denigration of Bob Dole's campaign.
"Bob Dole is likely to lose the presidential race to Bill Clinton," Kristol
wrote in the April 29 issue. "The challenge for Republicans and conservatives
is to prevent a Dole defeat from derailing the ongoing Republican realignment
and from blocking the emergence of a new era of conservative governance."

Some critics wonder how Kristol could talk up the pro-choice,
pro-affirmative-action Powell while trashing Dole, who despite moderate views
on some issues and a lack of ideological fervor is clearly more conservative
than Powell. "I think Bill Kristol is showing himself to be more of an
opportunist than a principled conservative," says David Corn, Washington-bureau
chief for the left-liberal Nation.

"We haven't criticized Dole for being insufficiently conservative," protested
Kristol in an interview with the Phoenix. "We've criticized him for
running a lousy campaign." Kristol explains his infatuation with Powell by
saying he's someone who could actually beat Clinton; and though Kristol objects
to some of Powell's views, he thinks a Powell presidency would buy time for
more-conservative Republicans to consolidate their congressional gains.

The bottom line

The Standard immediately established itself as a vibrant, conservative
alternative to the two long-standing weekly journals of opinion, the Nation
and the centrist-neoliberal New Republic. (Slate, a new
weekly webzine edited by former TNR editor Michael Kinsley, may be
emerging as a fourth important player. It's located on the World-Wide Web at
http://www.slate.com.)

Kristol is optimistic that his magazine will break even on schedule, by the
end of its third year. Paid circulation, he says, has already hit 70,000, and
is well on its way to reaching its goal of 100,000. That figure can't be
independently verified, because the Standard is still too new to submit
its books to the scrutiny of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), which
tracks newspapers and magazines. But if Kristol's right, then the
Standard's debut can only be described as remarkable: according to ABC,
the Nation's most recent circulation figure was 97,680, with TNR
right behind at 97,196.

More important, the Standard has delivered quality. With a gifted
editorialist in David Tell, a veteran Beltway insider in Fred Barnes, a skilled
polemicist in David Brooks, big-name contributors such as Pulitzer Prize winner
Charles Krauthammer and humorist P.J. O'Rourke, and aggressive young reporters
such as Tucker Carlson, Matt Labash, and Matthew Rees, the Standard has
gained a reputation as the hot new book of the right. In fact, though a direct
cause-and-effect relationship can't be proven, ABC figures show that the
circulation of William Buckley's biweekly National Review plunged from
250,654 at the end of 1994 to 218,322 at the end of 1995, and that the monthly
American Spectator's circulation fell from 279,106 to 221,457 over the
same period.

"I read the Standard first thing when it comes in, unlike a lot of
magazines," says WBZ Radio talk-show host David Brudnoy, a conservative who's a
contributing writer for National Review. Although Brudnoy thinks the
Standard lacks the "magisterial weight" of the Review, he gives
it high marks for being "sprightly and fun." Much of the credit, Brudnoy adds,
has to go to Kristol, whom he taught at a Harvard seminar in the 1970s, and
whom he remembers as "real quick" and "sharp."

Indeed, the Standard revolves around the 43-year-old Kristol and the
bright young Republicans he's surrounded himself with since the mid 1980s, when
he left Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he was an assistant
professor. Like John Podhoretz, Kristol's political lineage is formidable: his
father, Irving Kristol, founding editor of the Public Interest, is the
intellectual father of neoconservatism, a largely Jewish movement of former
liberals who embraced conservative views, especially on foreign policy, in the
1960s and '70s. Bill Kristol's mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, is an important
neocon figure in her own right. (Ironically, the Standard launched at
the same time as another political magazine started by a famous son: John
Kennedy Jr.'s glossy fanzine George.)

Serving first as chief-of-staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett, and
later filling the same role for Quayle, Kristol quickly established a
reputation as a brilliant tactician and a rather shameless self-promoter whose
leaks to the press during the 1992 campaign reportedly angered aides to George
Bush.

After leaving public office, Kristol established a one-man Washington think
tank. His weekly strategy memos to top Republican officials -- especially his
advice to reject the Clinton health plan, sight unseen -- gave him a reputation
as a skilled political infighter, and as a partisan who'd rather win than help
solve pressing national problems. That latter theme was explored at length in
two unflattering 1994 profiles in the New Republic and the Washington
Monthly. Kristol responds that he didn't have to wait to know that Clinton
would unveil a massive, big-government program that Republicans should
oppose.

By 1995 Kristol was an influential inside player who was frequently mentioned
as a future presidential chief-of-staff (though not, one presumes, in a Dole
Administration), and as an increasingly prominent figure regularly sought out
by political reporters and talking-heads shows. So it was surprising when he
talked Murdoch into parting with $3 million so he could launch a new career as
a journalist.

His high-profile hires -- Barnes, 53, from the New Republic, as
executive editor, and John Podhoretz, 35, from the Washington Times
(and, briefly, the New York Post), as deputy editor -- sent a signal
to some that Kristol intended to serve as a figurehead. Insiders, though, say
Kristol is a hands-on manager, bringing a thick folder of clippings and notes
to the Monday-morning staff meetings, which he presides over with a genial
blend of ideas, jokes, and Beltway gossip.

Standard fare

Despite its instant credibility, the question remains: is the
Standard an essential read for political junkies? Not necessarily.
Despite Kristol's tactical maneuvering, there's little in the pages of the
Standard to challenge the views of its conservative readers. Kristol
notes there have been exceptions, such as a Joseph Epstein piece last winter
defending federal funding of the arts. For the most part, though,
Standard fare is -- well, standard fare. Even a well-executed
exposé such as Tucker Carlson's piece on Ross Perot ("Is He Nuts?")
deals with a question to which we already know the answer (i.e., of
course he is).

David Shribman, the Boston Globe's Washington-bureau chief, calls the
Standard "a must-read," but thinks the magazine seems more "dutifully
conservative" than ideologically passionate -- unlike the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal, which Shribman thinks "tends to beat the
Standard at its own game." Indeed, Shribman says he sees little to
differentiate the Standard from the ostensibly liberal New
Republic, finding both of them to be too cautiously centrist.

That's not entirely fair to either magazine. Certainly Martin Peretz, the
editor-in-chief and chairman of TNR, objects. "I can't remember more
than a handful of New Republic articles that Bill Kristol would put in
his magazine," he says. Indeed, the ideologically eclectic TNR has been
moderately supportive of Clinton, and -- unlike the Standard -- has been
largely dismissive of Whitewater.

Peretz, Brudnoy, and others credit the Standard with a sense of humor,
but much of the humor is strained and not very funny. The back-of-the-book
"Parody," for instance, rarely clicks, although the take-off on Slate in
the current issue is worth a look. Genuine laughs -- such as P.J. O'Rourke's
jab at Hillary Rodham Clinton's It Takes a Village ("so much more than
just a self-help book for idiots") -- are rare.

There's also an immaturity that pops up in the magazine's pages from time to
time. Among the frequent contributors is Washington Times editorial-page
editor Tod Lindberg, a chief publicist for former FBI agent Gary Aldrich's
ridiculous anti-Clinton smear, Unlimited Access. The Standard has
also promoted the budding career of Wendy Shalit, younger sister of Ruth
Shalit, notorious for her plagiarizing and factual whoppers. Certainly Wendy
Shalit should not be punished for the sins of her sibling, whom she reportedly
loathes. But given that she has not yet graduated from Williams College, why
splash her name on the cover, especially since her work has been
unremarkable?

Then there's the Murdoch factor. The media baron has reportedly taken a
hands-off approach. (Almost. Barnes recalls rushing to a pay phone outside a
7-Eleven during his son's soccer game so he could return a call to the boss. It
turns out that Rupe just wanted to engage in some political chit-chat. "And my
son scored a goal in my absence," Barnes says.)

But there's something odd about a magazine pushing conservative values while
being funded by a man who got rich from such raunchy fare as topless
"page-three girls" and Married. . .with Children.
"It's a business," Kristol responds breezily. "I don't think the Murdoch empire
has been bad for humanity." It's certainly been good for Bill Kristol.

Ultimately, though, the Weekly Standard must be assessed on its own
merits. In just nine months, it's grown into a precocious adolescent: smart,
insouciant, and cocky, more interested in the game of politics than the
drudgery of policy, a hip journal for people who believe -- or who want to
believe -- that being conservative is hip. It caters to a mindset
Podhoretz described without irony recently when he wrote of a party at which
older Republicans "wondered just when it was that 22-year-olds began smoking
cigars and drinking highballs, and just why they looked so good doing it."

Like those 22-year-olds, the Standard looks good. It remains to be seen
whether it can grow into a responsible adult.